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Seymour Hersh,
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New Yorker. His latest article in this month’s issue of The New Yorker is called "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, Who Investigated the Abu Ghraib Scandal, Became One of Its Casualties."

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Over three years ago, Seymour Hersh exposed the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in an article largely based on a leaked report by Major General Antonio Taguba. Now Taguba has spoken to Hersh in his first interview since being forced to retire. Taguba reveals that he was blocked from investigating who ordered the abuse at Abu Ghraib and how more pictures and video exist showing the torture. [includes rush transcript]

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMYGOODMAN: New details have emerged in the Abu Ghraib scandal and with them new questions that reach right to the top. In his first interview since leading the Pentagon’s investigation into Abu Ghraib, Major General Antonio Taguba has revealed he disclosed key findings and photographs of the abuses as early as January 2004. That’s months before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush say they first learned of what went on at the Iraqi prison. Taguba also says he was forced to retire because his report was too critical of the U.S. military.

He says the military has unpublished photographs and videos that show the abuse and torture was even worse than previously disclosed. That includes video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female prisoner and information of the sexual humiliation of a father and his son. Taguba says he was blocked from investigating who ordered the torture at Abu Ghraib.

In May 2004, he indicated where that may have led him, when he was questioned by Senator John Warner of Virginia and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan.

SEN. JOHNWARNER: Within simple words, your own soldier’s language, how did this happen?

MAJ. GEN. ANTONIOTAGUBA: Failure in leadership, sir, from the brigade commander on down; lack of discipline; no training whatsoever; and no supervision. Supervisory omission was rampant. Those are my comments.

AMYGOODMAN: That was General Taguba being questioned by Senators Warner and Levin in May of 2004. The new details of General Taguba’s story were revealed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in this week’s issue of The New Yorker magazine. Hersh first exposed the Abu Ghraib scandal three years ago. His latest article is called "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, Who Investigated the Abu Ghraib Scandal, Became One of Its Casualties." Seymour Hersh joins us now from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy.

SEYMOURHERSH: Hello.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. First of all, how did you end up speaking to General Taguba? Hasn’t spoken, since he left, publicly.

SEYMOURHERSH: Oh, just the way that reporters do things. I had been making a lot of speeches across the country in which I was very praiseful of his report. Amy, you should understand there’s been, what, about officially a dozen reports made about Abu Ghraib. And his report, the first one, which perhaps was never meant to be public, as the others were, was spectacular. I’ve read a lot of reports in my life, and all of a sudden I’m reading a report by a general who’s actually criticizing his peers, his fellow two-star generals — he was a major general, Taguba — and in which he’s talking about systematic abuse, in which he’s clearly indicating that this was way beyond just a few MPs. He’s not saying it, per se, but the language of his — the tone of his report — and, of course, part of my thought was that he had been born in the Philippines, and getting from being a second lieutenant out of ROTC in Idaho, where he came from — he and his family moved to Idaho, became a citizen, I think, when he was about 12 or 13 — making it from there to two-star is — this is a remarkable guy.

And at some speech, I ran into somebody who went to school with him, who apparently forwarded some of my comments. And I think Taguba was always interested in how I got his report. If you remember, in The New Yorker we published his report before it was made available and before it was declassified — and Rumsfeld, by the way, has said to Congress, even before he got to see it, or he chose to see it. And so, at some point, we just started talking, more than a year ago.

And he’s not interested in publicity. He’s getting inundated with calls, and, as far as I know, he hasn’t agreed to talk to anybody, and he’s not going to write a book, and he’s not looking to be famous. He’s just a tough guy. And I thought the most revelatory line about him was — he was five-foot-six when he joined the Army and weighed 120 pounds. And he said to me one morning — I would see him sometimes just for coffee, sometimes for lunch, sometimes just to talk — well, months ago, years ago, a year ago, he said to me one day, without any bitterness, he said, "Let me tell you about discrimination. I was told as a young officer I had to repeat everything twice, because I couldn’t speak English well enough. I got three master’s degrees, and I paid for them myself, because the Army thought I was too dumb to finance me." And he said, "It was rough, but I worked hard and I made it. And that’s what I always thought you had to do."

And so, when he got the assignment by sheer circumstance — it was just he happened to be in a headquarters in the war zone in Kuwait when they needed a two-star general — there were only two — and as the Army goes, somebody saw him first and said, "You’ve got it." There was nothing more than that. It was absolutely by chance. He just thought, "I’m going to do the job the way I’ve done everything." And it turned out that cost him his career.

AMYGOODMAN: You begin your piece by talking about that meeting on May 6, 2004, that General Taguba has when he’s summoned before Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense. Describe it.

SEYMOURHERSH: Well, actually, he had never been in Rummy’s office — Rumsfeld’s office before. He had been in the outer office, but never has seen the secretary of defense. And he’s suddenly called, because on the next day — this is about 10 days after the stories that I did, and CBS, if you remember, also published, printed, aired photographs, some of the photographs, so there was a whirlwind of attention. This was a huge international issue and not very good for the United States. So Rumsfeld was supposed to testify on the 7th before two committees, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, so they summoned in Taguba.

And as he gets there, Rumsfeld’s military aide, a general named Craddock, who, like everybody around Rumsfeld, everybody who participated in this, has been promoted, where those on the other side have not been — in any case, Craddock — his daughter had babysat for Taguba when they served together in an Army station in Georgia years earlier — certainly very friendly — and this time when Antonio, Tony, walked into the meeting, Craddock was very cold. "Wait here," he said. Then they finally ushered him into the big room. And there’s the secretary of defense, Mr. Rumsfeld; there’s Wolfowitz, Paul Wolfowitz, then his deputy; there’s the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Myers; General Pace, then the deputy chairman; there’s a bunch of other senior generals. The whole major league cast was there.

And as Taguba walks in, Rumsfeld, who’s never met him, says in a word very ripe with mockery, he said — his phrasing was, that is — he said, "Here comes General Taguba" — no, the "famous general" — "Here comes the famous General Taguba." And, look, Taguba’s not a violent man, but it’s good for Rumsfeld he wasn’t. He was really hot about that — I mean, mocking him for doing his job.

And then, what they did is everybody played dumb. "My God! We didn’t know." And Rumsfeld — it was Wolfowitz at one point said, "Well, is this really torture what happened?" As you know, the government has made a big — this government has made a big distinction between abuse and torture, with one legal definition of "torture" being when you actually break a bone, that could be construed as torture, but anything short of that, that kind of physical pain, is not. And they asked if it was just — "Was this abuse?" And Tony, Antonio, recalled replying, "Well, you’ve got a naked guy in a wet cell and you’re shoving things up his rectum, and he’s not dressed — I mean, he’s not been fed, and he’s not been treated — you know, I don’t know what else you’d call that but torture." And he said there was silence.

And, in general, the game was, as Rumsfeld testified the next day, the game was simply: "Oh, my god," said the secretary of defense, "if I had only known. I had no idea about this. I didn’t look at the pictures until the day" — he’s given various stories, but "until the day or night before I came to the Congress, and nobody ever gave me any information about this." That was his testimony. That’s basically the president’s position today.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has gotten this first interview with General Taguba, revealing why he retired and what he knew about Donald Rumsfeld and — well, we’ll look up the chain of command after this break.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Donald Rumsfeld’s defense is that he first learned of the extent of the abuse after the photographs were made public. This is what he told Congress after the scandal broke in May of 2004.

DONALDRUMSFELD: It breaks our hearts that, in fact, someone didn’t say, "Wait! Look! This is terrible!" We need to do something to manage the — the legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the president didn’t know and you didn’t know and I didn’t know. And as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press. And there they are.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Donald Rumsfeld, May 7, 2004. Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New Yorker magazine, what did Rumsfeld know? When did he know it? What does General Taguba say?

SEYMOURHERSH: I’m always amazed hearing that bit that one of his big complaints is that the report that Taguba wrote was leaked. But, anyway, look, actually what you said in the introduction was slightly wrong about — just in terms of who was responsible for what. Taguba did not begin his job as investigator until the end of January. On January the 13th, I think, or perhaps a day or so — give me a break on that, I’m not sure — January the 13th, one of the guys in the military police unit at Abu Ghraib prison, one of the guys whose partners, whose pals, were in the photographs, the infamous photographs — you know, the pyramids, etc. — and everybody in the unit was circulating CDs and photographs — all soldiers have these cellphones with cameras in them — and he just had it, and he walked in with a CD to the Army Criminal Investigation Division, the Army cops. There was a unit there at Abu Ghraib at the prison.

And within two days after that, the back channel, which is, as you know, not surprisingly, generals talk to each other. They talk to each other in ways that they don’t want anybody to see. Sometimes it’s Monday and, I’m sure, about golf games, but a lot of times, it’s very important. These aren’t classified, per se, because they’re very private. You rarely get a chance to see the back channel.

What happened in Taguba’s case is, by the time he got on the job in late January and was given the assignment, the back channel had — there had been five, six, seven messages already, very explicit messages. He was given copies of those messages. By the 15th, the military assistant to Rumsfeld, the three-star general, the military assistant to Wolfowitz, the director of the joint staff or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, probably the most important position in the Joint Chiefs, various sorted other generals with direct ties to the leadership — and, of course, when you’re talking to Rumsfeld’s military assistant, a general then named Craddock — I mentioned him earlier — you’re talking to Rumsfeld; that’s how you communicate with him in this system — they were given explicit memoranda and details, particularly very vivid, graphic descriptions of what the photographs show. As Taguba said, you didn’t need to "see" the photographs — that is, quote/unquote "see" — to know what was on them. So Rumsfeld’s defense that he didn’t see them 'til right before, therefore he didn't realize how serious this was, is sort of shredded by these back-channel messages.

There were exchange after exchange. I quote some of them to some degree. It was in one of these messages there was something rather explicit about the actions against women, more than has been made public, that you mentioned earlier, too. So what you have is a body of evidence that shows that the senior leadership was extremely aware of how serious this was. By the 20th — one of the memos on the 20th was simply saying — one of the memos said, "Is this as real as it seems? YES" — Y-E-S, in capital letters, you know — "Are there photographs? YES. Is it pretty devastating? YES" And there was a lot of — actually, I should say, honorable and direct chit-chat in the back channel about "Let’s deal with this correctly. This is huge. We’ve got to make sure we don’t mess this one up. Maybe we should make it public ourselves." All of this was being done. General Myers, actually, in one of his appearances before Congress mentioned the back channel, but not quite by saying it. He said, "Well, we received a series of messages very earlier on with a lot of details, including accounts of the photographs." He did say that at one point. So even he is contradicting Rumsfeld.

But it’s a position that I think if you’re Rumsfeld — well, I’ll just tell you what happened to Taguba. Taguba finishes his report in late February, early March. Nobody wants to read it. He can’t get people to read his report. He’s trying to get the upper echelon. That’s part of his job, is to go to the command structure and inform them of what he’s found. His investigation is not criminal. At the same time, the Army investigators and the cops are doing a criminal investigation into the kids in the photographs. His investigation is really more about the politics of the event and the overall level of responsibility, not about, you know, what you’re going to do to each kid in the photographs. One three-star general refused to see the photographs and explicitly said to him, "Look, if I look at these, then I have knowledge of them, then I have to act. I don’t want knowledge." Basically, that was the position. Only one general, the head of the Army, Pete Schoomaker, actually read it and later sent Taguba a very kind note and a gracious note about how competent it was. But the rest of them simply didn’t want to know.

And again, by March, you’ve got a chain of command, you’ve got a lot of generals working for a very tough guy, Rumsfeld. They know this incident went down. They know everybody knows a lot about it. Rumsfeld has testified differently about when he talked to the president on various occasions, either late January, early February, but certainly he and Myers both testified they spent time with Bush on this. And I have two things to say about that. One, of course, is, if nobody knew anything and we had no idea how serious it is and, as Rumsfeld has said repeatedly in testimony, 18,000 court-martials a year, why are they talking to the president about it? What do they have to tell the president for about it if it’s not — if nothing anybody had any idea how serious it was?

And given the fact that they did talk to the president — and what the president did is really the crux of what I see. That’s how I ended my story writing about this. Bush, at some point, whether it was in January, February or March, was made aware of the details, maybe not all the salient details, but many of them. And what did he do? Did he say, "Rummy, I want some generals heads"? Did he say, "I want an investigation"? Did he say, "We’ve got to stop this practice"? What he did was, Amy, was nada. So inside the chain, this very sensitive, you know, hummahumma instrument of the military, everybody knew by the spring of '04 investigating detainee abuse is not a way to get a third star if you're two-star and not a way to get ahead.

And certainly Taguba, by then, knew it. Among the things he told me was, from the moment he got the assignment, he isolated — there were 23 people on his staff, including many career officers, colonels, etc. — he isolated everybody. He was going to be the point man on this so nobody’s career could get hurt except his. He was the front guy, and he was aware, very aware, of the dangers.

And there’s an amazing, I think, and astonishing moment in the article — and to give you some idea of his integrity, The New Yorker has this very complicated and detailed fact-checking process, in which no matter how many times they sing and dance, somebody from The New Yorker fact-checking staff sits down with Taguba for a day and goes over everything very carefully. And this is his chance to opt out, say, "I don’t remember it that way. That’s not right." There’s a scene where in April General Abizaid, John Abizaid, not a bad guy, the commander who retired early this year, allegedly because he wanted to retire, but actually I think he was fired. But that’s another story. Abizaid is in Kuwait. He’s in the back seat. He’s driving with Tony Taguba. The report’s not published yet, but it’s done. It’s sitting there. And he says to Tony, as Taguba remembers it — and we certainly gave Abizaid and everybody a chance with email messages and telephone calls and long summaries of what we’re doing, including to Rumsfeld; everybody got a chance to comment on this weeks before the story was published — we are not trying to sandbag anybody — Abizaid said to Taguba, "You know, Tony," — and the message was — "the only victim of this, the only person that’s going to get hurt in this, is you, if you don’t watch it." And Taguba said he remembered thinking then — he said to me that "I had been in the Army then for 32 years, and it was the first time I thought I was in the Mafia."

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who has just written a piece on his interview with General Taguba in The New Yorker magazine. Tell us who Colonel Jordan is.

SEYMOURHERSH: Well, what happened is — now you’re getting to the part of the story that really is the most fascinating for me, that’s very — the press hasn’t looked at this yet, and I hope they do. What happened to Taguba is — very quickly, first of all, the first thing that happened is he right away instinctively knew that what these kids were doing, the major thing they were doing, the major abuse was this: The MP’s defense was, under the Army regulations, military policemen who run a prison — and this was a reserve unit from West Virginia. These kids basically were trained to be traffic cops. They were given just a little bit of training about running a prison.

The way it works is — the regulations are very clear. The people running the prison run the prison. They feed them, house them, take care of them. They don’t do anything else. They don’t get involved in interrogations, because otherwise you break up the trust, which you can only — you know, you have to have a prison run — it has to run orderly. The people have to assume that the MPs are not there to do anything but take care of them.

In this case, what happened is, the MPs were under instructions from the fall of ’03, when the games began, to soften up the prisoners for the military intelligence people, for the interrogators, because the insurgency was on — it became very heavily the previous late summer — and there was a lot of panic in the White House about not knowing much about the insurgency, hence the decision to increase the pressure and get more intelligence from the prison population, particularly the young males who were assumed to be, many of them, knowledgeable of the insurgency.

So the MP’s job was to do whatever they could — keep them awake at night, the prisoners. They kept them unclothed. They kept them unfed. They mistreated them. All designed to soften them up for the intelligence process. Taguba understood that had to be a high order, but he was boxed in. The order which he was given was to investigate the MP brigade or battalion — it’s a brigade — and nothing more. He couldn’t go beyond that.

But inevitably, he ran into a Lieutenant Colonel Jordan, and he saw signs of very sophisticated intelligence activity inside the prison, certainly among some of the more valuable — they call high-value targets. Jordan was listed as the executive officer of the military intelligence unit that was at Abu Ghraib, the interrogation unit, but he denied being that. They couldn’t find him for weeks. When they did find him, he showed up in civilian clothes, wanted to know if he had to shave off his beard. He apparently had grown a beard. He had to. And in general, his story was so riddled with untruths and mistruths. In any case, Taguba had his rights read to him. Jordan’s now the only officer facing charges out of this affair. Seven enlisted men had been charged and sentenced and convicted, but no officer. He’s the first officer facing charges. And so, Taguba began to realize there was something going on outside there.

He also knew, as he did his investigation and was given more access, and particularly as his investigation came to an end, he began to understand that there was a huge secret codicil going on, and about which I probably — one of the things that interested him the most about me was I had written back in 2004, did three articles for The New Yorker, and the third one talked about the secret world, the world of JSOC, Joint Special Operation Command operations, military task force, high-level units that had no — that reported to nobody but God, basically to the secretary of defense through a back channel.

And so, what he stumbled into, what he was really dealing with, was, as I wrote in the article, is the decision of the secretary of defense — and I’m told with the concurrence of Cheney, one never knows where the president is on this, but I assume he had to be aware of what was going on, Cheney certainly was — they decided in the fall of '03 we were doing what they call "strategic interrogation" — I'm not quite sure what that means — strategic interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo. And it was decided to send a commander of Guantanamo, a major general named Geoff Miller, to Iraq to train the kids there, instruct them and set up rules and procedures for doing strategic interrogation. And so, you were bringing in some of the Special Forces, and some of the more high-level intelligence activity techniques into Abu Ghraib.

And it’s my belief — so I’ve been told by my sources, not Taguba; the story is partly about Taguba and partly about this — that what happened was, the White House, and basically Rumsfeld, was in a real problem when Abu Ghraib broke. If you have a full investigation into Abu Ghraib, you’re going to stumble into the very, very highly classified — in fact, the most classified there — most of the missions, the task forces, were put into what they called the SAP, the Special Access Program, the highest level of secrecy in the government — the U-2 spy plane was built in a SAP, for example — mostly used for technical stuff. But under Rumsfeld, after 9/11, it began being used for field operations.

These guys — we now probably in as many as 13 countries, the president of the United States has delegated a hundred killer teams, they call them, from the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC — they have been given pre-delegation. When they find a high-value target, they can act against them, capture, or in most cases, kill. So you’re given a group of guys that are given the authority to kill in North Africa, the Middle East, obviously, also in other parts of Africa. They have been given the authority to kill or make contact on site. They go into a country without clearing it with the ambassador or the CIA station chief. This is going on now. And this technique — some of their techniques were brought into Abu Ghraib. And so, if you do a full investigation into Abu Ghraib, you could unravel a lot of stuff nobody wanted to unravel then.

And the other aspect was — sort of amazing — was that there was another side to the photographs. As bad as they were, they did not show lethality. In other words, the MPs weren’t killing people. The killing was being done in task forces and other places, but you had a situation where you’ve got a bunch of kids, and so let them go face charges. It’s OK. Nobody could have assumed at that point that the photographs or the Taguba report would get out. Let them go face charges, because let some lower-level kids be hung out to dry, which they were — I mean, not that they didn’t do what they did. They were in the photographs. I’m talking about those — Lynndie English or England, whatever her name was — you remember the thumbs-up and thumbs-down lady. Certainly they deserve some time, but not the 10 years they got.

In any case, this is all also going down as Taguba is sort of running around trying to figure out what’s going on. There’s real machinations at work. And right now, we’re still very much in the hunter-killer business. It’s basically — my friends on the inside know these units. This is not disrespecting the men who serve in them, mostly men, because they’re competent soldiers, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, CIA paramilitary. They’re very competent. If they had different orders, they would probably behave differently. But they’re there now. They’re on the border with Iran right now. We have units right now that are dying for permission to go across the border and start whacking away at the Iranians. And that is the situation today. And that has not changed. A lot of hunter-killer teams are at work fighting the alleged al-Qaeda in Iraq, many of whom, as I’m sure you’re aware, many in your audience are aware, are really Sunni insurgents — they’re not really al-Qaeda. The foreign element in Iraq is very minor. But nonetheless, it’s good publicity.

AMYGOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, what about General Miller, Geoffrey Miller, who was sent from Guantanamo to, well, as they say, "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib in September of 2003?

SEYMOURHERSH: You know, the Senate, in its interrogation — I read the hearings quite a bit again, I hadn’t read them in years — the Senate Armed Services, Carl Levin of Michigan, who’s now the chairman of the committee, this full Senate Armed Services Committee — Democrats are in control — he asked that question: Was he there to Gitmoize? He smelled the issue. And, of course, everybody denies everything.

What they have to do — Miller was just an artillery officer who — competent, smart, smart enough, and willing to do what they wanted — went to Guantanamo. They treated the prisoners the way they wanted. There was a huge back channel. He was always on the phone. So the subsequent testimony developed, either with Rumsfeld, on occasion, and certainly with Steve Cambone, Rumsfeld’s under secretary of defense for intelligence. Steve Cambone was Rummy’s gofer, in the sense that somebody once described Cambone, in terms of his relationship with Rummy, he’s like the little three-year-old kid in the backseat who has got a steering wheel, and when daddy turns the car, he thinks he’s actually doing it. You know, he thinks he’s driving it, but really it’s the control was at a higher level. But he’s the action officer for Rumsfeld and for others.

And what happened is Miller was sent, did what they wanted to in Guantanamo, went up to Iraq, did what they wanted there. When everything hit the fan in the next spring, they tried to protect him. They could not. He retired early, definitely was very bitter about it, is not going to talk. I tried again this time. He feels he was totally left out to hang by Rumsfeld and Cambone for doing their bidding, sort of like Taguba, but in the other way. He did their bidding and got — he feels sort of screwed. Taguba didn’t do their bidding.

And I don’t think there’s any question that — you know, what happened was there was an investigation by the Army, a useless investigation. What happened was that after Abu Ghraib, all of their various reports that had been made by groups like the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, as you know, have done fantastic jobs and really have been with great — I have great admiration for what they’ve done. Human Rights Watch has been all over this stuff, in particular.

And after the Abu Ghraib, the government began to respond, and the Army had a bunch of investigations into some of the various allegations of abuses, including very serious allegations by FBI agents in Guantanamo, who had been complaining since '02 about what was going on there. And at some point they began an investigation, and because they needed a high-ranking general — as I mentioned, Taguba was a two-star — you needed a high-ranking general. They needed a three-star to investigate Miller, because he was a two-star. And they didn't have many. And they ran into an Air Force fighter jockey named Mark Schmidt out of — he now lives in Boise, Idaho, or near Boise, Idaho. And Mark Schmidt is just one of these pilots who flies for a living, and, you know, that’s a building, it’s a building — you know, no playing around. And he looked at what happened, and he wrote a report in which he accused General Miller of not doing his job right. There were a lot of malfeasance, certainly.

And his recommendation was overruled by the four-star general in charge of the Southern Command at that time that was responsible for Guantanamo. The Southern Command then was headed by General Craddock, who had been Rummy’s military aide, went to the Southern Command. He’s now commander at NATO. All these people seem to have great career tracks. Craddock overruled it. That had never happened before, that a recommendation that somebody be looked at, you know, for possible prosecution gets overruled by the convening authority. And so, there was an investigation into why they overruled this, which of course absolved Craddock.

And Schmidt, in his investigation, in his testimony, said the most amazing thing. He repeated it to me when I talked to him by phone a couple months ago. He said — basically what he said, "You know, if you really think about Guantanamo, but for a camera," he said, "it was Abu Ghraib." There were times then with some of the prisoners, with the dogs, and the women sexually abusing them in certain ways, you know, flaunting themselves, menstrual blood being poured on them, these Muslim men, nakedness, twenty hours of music a day. As he said, "but for a camera, it would be Abu Graib." So, look, the Senate right now has got a group of guys, Carl Levin, looking into this, and let’s just wish them well.

AMYGOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, a quick question before our satellite window closes, and that’s about this secret prison in Mauritania. The coup takes place in 2005, leading to a government that is friendlier to the United States. The Washington Post has revealed that there are these secret CIA prisons around Europe. Tell us about Mauritania.

SEYMOURHERSH: What happened was there was a junta. We helped them, certainly. Our CIA and our military were deeply involved in this junta. Whether we were totally responsible or if we’re not is another story. Once the new government was put in place, Mauritania became the prison. What the president was forced to do — Dana Priest, who’s got a very good series going right now in The Washington Post on healthcare for veterans, Dana Priest had written a terrific story in the fall of ’05 for The Washington Post about the secret prison system. So Bush, as you know, eventually shut it down.

But the fact is they then made Mauritania into another prison, where I would guess — I think Human Rights Watch or other groups have identified 37 or 39 people who they’ve lost — we can’t find them anywhere — where in the American prison system we can’t find them. Some of the tougher high-value targets are there. I’m sure what we call renditions — that is, night flights by people — are still going on. I don’t have specific — that’s just a rational assumption by me. I don’t know that specifically.

And Mauritania is a place where there is a secret holding pen, because it’s a place where you can fly in and out. There’s a very friendly government. Our soldiers don’t need visas. There was an election just the other week there. But for two years, a military junta that we helped put into power, certainly, was there. Yes, it’s — I’ve been wanting to — I’ve known that for quite a while. I’m glad I got finally a chance to write it. That there is a prison there, no question. All the details, I really don’t know. It’s very hard to get information about such places. But that became the prison of choice after they had to shut down the other operations in Europe and elsewhere.

AMYGOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His latest piece appears in The New Yorker magazine, based on his interview with General Taguba, called "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, Who Investigated the Abu Ghraib Scandal, Became One of Its Casualties."